Interesting reading. So exceeding the speed limit causes about the same % of accidents as Emergency Vehicles on call..5%. (with another 12% being caused by driving too fast for the conditions.) So what's all this rubbish about speed cameras significantly cutting accidents when they can only affect 5% of accidents anyway.
66% are caused by Driver Error including... 32% caused by failure to look properly, 18% by failure to judge other person's path/speed, Poor turn of manoeuvre 15%, loss of control 14% and sudden breaking 7% all of which cause more "accidents" than speeding.
"For fatal accidents the most frequently reported contributory factor was loss of control, which was involved in 35 per cent of road deaths." - And speed has nothing to do with with on what percentage of occasions? You don't lose control of a stationary car.
"Five of the six most frequently reported contributory factors were some kind of driver or rider error or reaction" - Of course they frigging were... a car alone won't cause an accident, it needs a "human error" at the wheel, mechanical failure or conditions introducing beyond the drivers control - tree falling in the road, load falling from a waggon etc. If it's none of the above it's not an "Accident", It's an "On Purpose" in'it.
There is no doubt that speed cameras are a form of taxation in my mind - HOWEVER I got a ticket , I don't thrape the arse of my cars BUT I exceeded the limit in an area I don't often travel where they reduced the limit and introduced cameras. No excuses caught fair and square. The main thing to come from this is now I'm VERY VERY alert to speed limits in areas I don't travel every day and use far more caution than I would have done previously. Most traffic officers will tell you that conviction is not the answer, education is the answer, I've been educated the hard way and I thought I was a good and safe driver, don't we all!
No I didn't, what is surprising is that the government has got away with concealing these statistics for so long, the article quotes "the first ever set of statistics released by the Department for Transport (DfT)". So what justification have they had for keeping the numbers secret, except so they could continue lying to us that speeding is such a serious issue that cameras are needed...
On which subject has the government not lied? - Irag, the NHS, tax, foot and mouth, identity cards .... the list goes on. Unfortunately Joe Public still seems to believe that the sun shines out of every orifice in Bliar's body.
I don't think they will have kept them secret, just that they weren't recorded across different force areas by the same "counting rules" and while some forces would have recorded certain aspects others wouldn't. It appears now they are working to one set of counting rules, however they do that with Crime , yet different forces still interpret the rules differently hence the need for the likes of the HMIC to Police the Police if you like, as soon as you start bean counting then any one looks for was of making their beans best for them. Thats the trouble with counting beans!
For me the question regards what caused the accident, "Loss of Control" or "Excess speed" doesn't really make the truth any clearer.... as in was it excess speed which caused the loss of control?
Besides - If the figures suggested that Speed was a cause of most accidents the a lot , and I mean A LOT of forces would have a hard job explaining why they have disbanded anything resemblent of a Traffic Department..... give it time though and the merry-go-round will be back to the start IMHO.
yep - it's a vey important legal point that has yet to be made.
Thinking more of stationary traffic offences really - but the point is the same. To those of us running any type of small business that involves using UK roads, these costs are not tax deductable and will not be until it can be 'proven' that the authorities prime motivation is revenue generation.
****** There's a difference between causing an accident and "affecting" one. It would take a rather more sophisticated accident study to assess what the consequences (in terms of injuries, damage to vehicles, etc) would have been if vehicles exceeding the limit had not been doing so.
40 percent increase in speed roughly doubles the energy that's got to be absorbed somewhere. If what really matters is the severity of an accidents, then one can very broadly think of the probability of a particular level of severe accident happening as the product of the probability of it happening at all (which many folk here do not believe correlates closely with speed) and the probability of that accident having severe consequences, which I'd guess rather more people accept as being a function of speed.
If I'm going to drive into a tree, for whatever reason, I'd rather do so at 30 mph than 40.
Disclaimer: I have no professional experience of road accident investigation, though I did investigate train crashes in a former existence.
So do I, and that attention dedicated to watching the speedo and scanning for hidden speed limit drops that just happen to coincide with cameras around the corner is attention redirected from the traffic around me. In my view cameras make the roads more dangerous, apart from the distraction there's the panic braking when people do see them and the flat out acceleration and braking of those familiar with the road.
Greg wrote: apart from the distraction there's the panic braking when people do see them and the flat out acceleration and braking of those familiar with the road.
Yeah, like the people who brake from 75 to 40 in the outside lane on the A43!! Last year a driver was killed when the car in fronr did this and the van behind was 'distracted'.
How many accidents are caused by speed cameras. I'm sure some camera spots that were marginal before, have become accident blackspots because of the speed camera.
On or around Sun, 15 Oct 2006 19:46:35 +0100, "Lee_D" enlightened us thusly:
that and the sudden braking. Of course, sudden braking could be caused by just having noticed an approaching speed camera...
I've long held that ALL fixed speed limits are a crude instrument which doesn't really work. Trouble is, they're cheap to implement, unlike proper driver training.
On or around Mon, 16 Oct 2006 20:27:37 +0100, Dave Gibbs enlightened us thusly:
I keep me eyes open and spot the cameras in time to slow down to a speed they won't trigger at.
I refuse to accept that a single speed limit has any meaning other than for one set of conditions. A lot of the time, the fixed limit is too high for safety. Sometimes, it's safe to drive faster.
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